Greeks in Himalaya!!!!!!!

[Yetos]

Find it yesterday,
it seems that Roopkun, (skeleton lake) on Himalayia had a secret hidden,
wait for genetists to discover it, and get surprised,

'' the second largest group is made up of 14 individuals with ancestry that is most closely related to people who live in the eastern Mediterranean, especially present-day Crete and Greece. ''

Source

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11357-9/figures/2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11357-9

https://www.academia.edu/40159432/A..._Lake_reveals_Mediterranean_migrants_in_India

https://www.shh.mpg.de/1438702/roopkund-lake-nayak

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/11/descendants-of-greeks-in-medieval.html

 

[Maciamo]

Unexpected. However they say that 14 Greek-looking individuals date to ~1800 CE, so only 200 years ago. That's during the era of the British Empire. The paper's title is very misleading as they talk of "ancient DNA" but that's not ancient at all. They are completely East Mediterranean genetically, without a trace of South Asian ancestry, so they were undoubtedly travellers (merchants, explorers, who knows), not locals. The paper says:

"It is tempting to hypothesize that the Roopkund_B individuals descend from Indo-Greek populations established after the time of Alexander the Great, who may have contributed ancestry to some present-day groups like the Kalash21. However, this is unlikely, as such a group would be expected to have admixture with groups with more typical South Asian ancestry (as the Kalash do), or would be expected to be inbred and to have relatively low genetic diversity. However, the Roopkund_B individuals have evidence for neither pattern (Supplementary Note 9). Combining different lines of evidence, the data suggest instead that what we have sampled is a group of unrelated men and women who were born in the eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control."

 

[Lukas]

Unexpected. However they say that 14 Greek-looking individuals date to ~1800 CE, so only 200 years ago. That's during the era of the British Empire. The paper's title is very misleading as they talk of "ancient DNA" but that's not ancient at all. They are completely East Mediterranean genetically, without a trace of South Asian ancestry, so they were undoubtedly travellers (merchants, explorers, who knows), not locals. The paper says:

"It is tempting to hypothesize that the Roopkund_B individuals descend from Indo-Greek populations established after the time of Alexander the Great, who may have contributed ancestry to some present-day groups like the Kalash21. However, this is unlikely, as such a group would be expected to have admixture with groups with more typical South Asian ancestry (as the Kalash do), or would be expected to be inbred and to have relatively low genetic diversity. However, the Roopkund_B individuals have evidence for neither pattern (Supplementary Note 9). Combining different lines of evidence, the data suggest instead that what we have sampled is a group of unrelated men and women who were born in the eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control."

Anwser is simple. It was probably Ottoman trade caravan consisted of Anatolian / Pontian Greeks which have either bad accident (probably they wanted to cross the lake in winter and ice broke. Or they were robbed and killed. And skeletons were thrown out to the lake.

I remember that for some time MTA used them as a proxy for Bactrian Greeks lol.

 

[Angela]

The paper was discussed here:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...ean-migrants-in-India?highlight=Roopkund+Lake

 

[Nikitas14]

Hi not sure if this helps solve any questions, but I came up as a close match to 5 of the Greek travelers. I was 95%-99% match to those travelers and my family is from Rhodes, Greece.

 

[pxxlsisk]

I wonder how they could get there.